You can "cure stupid" ASFPM 2016
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Presentation from my ASFPM 2016 concurrent session on improving disaster outcomes through effective risk and crisis communication.
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You can "cure stupid" ASFPM 2016
- 1. Empowering Smart Disaster Decision-Making through Smart Communication You can “cure stupid”
- 2. Premise #1 The biggest barrier to reducing flood risk and to making flood warnings more effective is that people don’t understand that disasters change things.
- 3. Premise #2 Risk communication can do more than reduce flood risk, it can save lives in flood events. Crisis communication is more effective when it is preceded by effective risk communication. Risk Communication Crisis Communication IMPROVED DISASTER OUTCOMES +
- 4. Disaster Communication Loss reduction Risk reduction actions Crisis Communication Adaptive decision making Risk Communication Pre-Event Event
- 6. Thinking about disaster Normalcy Bias Sensemaking Information Seeking
- 7. The three most important words: Disasters change things.
- 8. Normalcy Bias Overestimating our abilities Underestimating the impact of disaster Availability of resources Environmental changes Physical changes
- 9. Fifty Years of ‘Awareness’ About half of families have taken some steps to be better prepared Frequent events = higher preparedness rates, and better mitigation buy in
- 10. Sensemaking Building a framework to understand an unfamiliar situation Thinking by acting Required for decision making
- 11. When sensemaking fails No decision making Feeling completely overwhelmed and helpless Anger, sense of betrayal, denial, panic Bad decision making An inability to conceive the reality of what you are experiencing Continuing to make bad decisions in spite of obvious feedback
- 12. Information Seeking It takes three messages (or a message and two confirming sources) to move most people to action In short fuse events, there may not be time for information seeking
- 13. Risk > Crisis > Response Effective risk communication Reduces information seeking Provides a framework for interpreting crisis communication Builds skills for adaptive decision making
- 14. Research > Application > Results
- 15. 1 Awareness to Action Communicator Audience Outcome Provide information Receive Understand Believe Awareness Reinforce w/ text, pictures, maps, sources Personalize Confirm with others Weigh credibility Assess own ability Intention Clear directions Expected consequences Outcome expectancy Cost/Benefit Trust Action
- 16. Improving Risk Communication Teach cues to recognize the event Give instructions in an easy to remember format Emphasize that disasters change things Give achievable tasks (success builds confidence) Teach them to follow their instincts (not the crowd)
- 17. Improving Crisis Communication Tell them who you are Tell them what you know Tell them what you don’t know yet, and when you will know it Tell them how you know it
- 18. Improving Crisis Communication Tell them what to do protective action, achievable tasks Tell them what will happen if they don’t Tell them quickly Tell them in a way they will understand No jargon, big words or figures of speech Acknowledge that they have a choice
- 19. Acknowledging Choice Give (achievable) options Make consequences clear
- 20. Acknowledging Choice Introjection Integration Denial Compliance Increased stress Reduced sense of control Compliance Reduced stress Increased sense of control No compliance Performing a task because they feel they have to Performing a task because they feel it is important Refusing to perform a task
- 21. Premise #3 Ethical obligation is comprised of: The responsibility to do a thing The ability to do a thing
- 22. Questions? Ronda Oberlin, CFM CEM Emergency Management Specialist City of Lansing Office of Emergency Management 517-483-4110 ronda.oberlin@lansingmi.gov The issue is no longer about understanding public behavior. The challenge now is modifying public behavior.” Valerie Lucus-McEwen
Editor's Notes
- In 2010, I was sitting on a FEMA national grant review panel. I had already done a lot of research into effective risk and crisis communication, and I got into a discussion with a woman from the State of ME EM about whether or not we had an ethical responsibility to communicate better with the public. She said something and I didn’t have an answer, so I went home and started this line of inquiry. Six years later, I came out of it with one and a half master’s degrees and this presentation. So, this everything you’re going to hear today is because I can’t stand to lose arguments.
- People don’t understand the scope and impact of a disaster: they don’t understand how it will impact their resources, their environment, and their own physical abilities. Normalcy bias: the assumption that everything will stay the same, except wetter, in a flood.
- When we talk about preparing people for disasters, I think we think of it in a very passive way. When in fact, people are very active participants in disaster. They don’t just sit in their homes being disaster victims, they have to make decisions. Am I going to follow emergency instructions? How can I follow them with my limitations/resources/priorities? What will I do if something goes wrong while I’m following them? Is it safe to go into my flooded basement to turn the power off? Is it safe to eat the food that’s been in my refrigerator without power for two days?
- Metacognitive awareness – being aware of how you think and how you learn. We want people to be aware of how they think about disaster and how they will think during a disaster. Not going to spend a lot of time on this, although I would like to, but the important point is that the bottom three tiers are where we live during a disaster (stop, drop and roll; run, hide, fight). To be good disaster decision makers we need to be in the top tiers, but that has to be done before the disaster.
- Let’s talk about how people think in a disaster. I want to look at three specific phenomenon and how they impact how they are receiving our messages.
- It’s not that most people don’t believe that disasters will happen (although clearly some of them don’t) it’s that they believe that they can handle whatever might happen. This is our normalcy bias: we believe that our actions will always have the same outcome and that things will basically always stay the same. If you don’t believe that disasters change things then you don’t think it’s worth it to invest any time, money or effort into being better prepared. If you don’t believe that disasters change things, then emergency instructions are overblown and it doesn’t make sense to follow them. All about cost-benefit.
- Normalcy bias is the reason we look at our phones for just a second while we’re driving. Because until something happens in that split second we don’t believe anything can, or that we won’t be able to handle it if it does. Story about Joe and 911. Adrenaline can be a great asset in an emergency, but it only wants to do big things. It wants to lift cars off people, it doesn’t want to find a phone number.
- A lot of studies, same general results. Seems pretty obvious, right? Here’s what we need to understand: Frequent events do what risk communication hasn’t been able to do--change people’s normalcy bias.
- Sensemaking is something we do automatically in any unfamiliar situation. Usually so fast that we don’t even know that we’re doing it. It’s the: “Wait a minute, what’s going on here?” and the, “Oh, now I get it,” process. Your mind will automatically look for patterns: similar situations, training, stories you’ve heard, etc. Your mind may also disregard what it considers to be an anomaly in the pattern. (I noticed that the sky looked funny, but I didn’t think anything of it). Here’s where those knowledge frameworks come in. Remember, all you have in a crisis is what you bring in with you. Did you ever notice how nobody learns to swim in the middle of a raging river. You can’t learn to swim when you’re using all of your resources trying not to drown. We can stand here and go over all of the motions of swimming strokes and breathing techniques, and we can learn those facts, but it doesn’t become knowledge until you’re in the pool and you put it all together. Now it’s not just facts anymore, it’s something that you know how to do.
- Imagine you’re in a familiar building but it’s completely dark. You know the building and you know that if you take the second corridor on the left and then take the next two rights you’ll get outside. So you take the second left, two rights, and you’re not at the front door. What then? You’ve lost your frame of reference. You don’t know where you are, so you don’t know what to do next. You don’t know if the next thing you try will make things worse. Two common reactions – one is to shut down, the other is to ignore the feedback and keep going Cosmology episodes are often a contributing factor in airplane crashes. Pilots disregard what their instruments are telling them when they do not support the pilot’s own understanding of the situation, particularly at times of low visibility.
- Study published (2005) showed that the closer people were to the events of 9/11 the more time they spent seeking information. That makes sense until you realize that the closer they were to the event, the less time they had to spend seeking information. The study found that there were people who died in the World Trade Centers who had time to evacuate, but delayed to seek information.
- If you’re thrown into a raging river and you know how to swim you can remember, understand and apply what you already know; but if you can’t swim, me standing on the river bank shouting out the strokes to you isn’t going to do a lot of good. That’s what we’re doing sometimes when we send out emergency instructions.
- So how do we apply it. Remember I told you I want to find applications for all of this valuable, exciting research that’s being done…and hidden in a secret vault… called Google Scholar
- When I said that I had already been working with research when I the incident occurred in 2010, this is part of what I was talking about. There was already 30 years of research at that point, and this and what I’m talking about today is really synthesized from a variety of fields: psychology, sociology, communication, education and organizations in crisis, along with lessons learned from disasters. What do we know from all that research? One of the things is this process, which was identified in both risk and crisis communication research. Our job is to reduce losses to life and property, right? But actually protecting those things in reality is out of our hands. That’s up to the public to do the things we tell them to do, before and during a disaster. So if they fail, can we shrug that off and say we gave them the information and they chose not to act on it? If a military commander is responsible for taking an enemy base and his soldiers fail, who failed? Is it acceptable for him to say, “I told them how to do it, it’s not my fault they failed.” No, because he’s responsible for the mission. Do we have a mission?
- Teach cues, but also encourage them to notice and not dismiss Disasters change things – personal stories, importance of positive with negative Preparedness activities are in effect “training” to develop mental models that will help you interpret disaster information.
- Implying certainty where it doesn’t exist not only erodes trust, but it impedes sensemaking. Giving someone things they can accomplish gives them a sense of control in the face of a potentially overwhelming event In a way that they understand means avoid jargon, big words and figures of speech. Acknowledge that they have a choice – We were all friends til we got there, weren’t we?
- Implying certainty where it doesn’t exist not only erodes trust, but it impedes sensemaking. Giving someone things they can accomplish gives them a sense of control in the face of a potentially overwhelming event In a way that they understand means avoid jargon, big words and figures of speech. Acknowledge that they have a choice – We were all friends til we got there, weren’t we?
- Why should we acknowledge that they have a choice? They do, right? Even mandatory evacuation orders are hard to enforce and where I come from people don’t do what their told just because the government says so. Does it matter if they want to or not, as long as they do it? You tell me. Introjection is carrot and stick; Integration is about intrinsic rewards. It reduces stress and increases a sense of control and those things make better disaster decision makers, a sweeter carrot and a sharper stick can’t.
- I tell the public that if they’re not prepared that it’s not because the information isn’t available, but the same is true of us. I’m not going to argue with anybody here about whether or not you have a responsibility to your public to improve disaster outcomes. But if I’ve supported the first three premises I gave you today, then the information on how to improve disaster outcomes is available and within our reach. I hope you’ll agree with me, because I can’t afford a PhD.